Hazelfaern Again

Ever since I read a few lines about FDR’s influential appointee to the New York State Power Authority, Leland Olds, and then later, a few words about E.F Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of liberal economics — not something I’ve heard much about.

Which is why I jumped on Deep Economy the moment I found it in my local library’s collection.

Admittedly, Deep Economy is not a lesson in economics — at least, not in the fashion of tedia which you might apply to your tax return. It is, however, a fascinating overview of the ways in which the US economy and, more specifically, our beliefs about that economy and the imperative of economic growth, intersect with the health of the planet, the viability of our communities and the elusive nature of human happiness.

In that sense, Deep Economy picks up the threads and interweaves the philosophies of Deep Ecology, the Local Foods movement and what is shaping up to be the Local Community movement into one decisive and pondersome whole.

Paired with another book I’m currently reading, Your Money or Your Life, it’s almost enough to usher in the new Age of Sincerity.

I do believe this is my favorite cookbook — and it’s not even really a cookbook. It’s a collection of 2 seperate and distinct serial cooking zines with a common (well, somewhat common) theme.

Hot Damn and Hell Yeah: Recipes for Hungry Banditos is a fantastic Tex-Mex inspired collection of vegan recipes written up by some bloke in Australia named Ryan Splint.

The Dirty South Cookbook is a collection of authentic, veganized Southern recipes written up by someone who’s recently vacated the South — authoressed by a lady named Vanessa.

I love both collections for their simplicity and their usefulness. Recipes include homemade worchestershire sauce, mexican chili gravy, black bean salsa, almost sour cream, flour tortillas, red beans and rice, black bean and sweet potato burritos, pumpkin soup, 3 different kinds of chili, a couple of southwestern burgers, spiced ice cream and apple enchiladas; hush puppies, johnny cakes, maccaroni casserole, turnip stew, black eyed pea cakes, carrot salad, roasted pepper salad, corn meal mush, red velvet cake, sweet potato pudding and amalgamation cake. Whew, it’s a mouthful in so many ways

I have been looking for a recipe for flour tortillas for some time, so I was really excited to find one in this cookbook. So far I’m still trying to master the thickness factor (so the tortillas don’t turn out like savory pancakes so much…) but the recipe is otherwise fantastic. I’ve also fallen in love with the black bean and sweet potato burritos, the black eyed pea cakes (so damn tasty both hot and cold) and, believe it or not, corn meal mush, which is actually quite a bit like cream of wheat’s love child after a smoldering fling with quick-cook grits. I recommend doctoring it up all savory like, especially with tahini, Earth Balance and a touch of chili powder. Yum.

But the best part is that these recipes work so well with the local food I’ve been trying to eat more of.

So I spent an hour this afternoon blogging about my most recent reading adventure when an auto-update shut down my browser and killed my fresh post.

Bah! Bugger it. What I’d really like to do is start a tradition of book-recommendation for my blog, preferably one that doesn’t seriously stress me out. You see, I may not be into spending an hour every other day cross-anylizing my insights and deeper preferences over a given tome, but I can spend a few minutes cobbling a picture of what I’m reading into an entry window, if nothing else but for future reference (and a slightly shadow way to keep my blog freshly updated, ha).

SO! Rather than giving the deep post-feminist insights I was originally prepping for this space, I’ll give you a spectrum in pictures of what I’ve been reading lately — comments possible at a later date.

The New Compost Pile, originally uploaded by hazelfaern.

I’ve been immersed in garden reading this month, especially material on organic food gardening and the related art of composting.

I was inspired to build a new compost bin out of recycled pallets and I’m redonkulously dorked-out excited about the results. Well, consider that this is the first thing I’ve built that wasn’t, say, Target furniture. It didn’t come with instructions and I figured out how to build it with free materials and 3 nails.

The shiny circle at the top of the bin is most likely an old metal belt from a long-gone wooden bucket. I like it because it reminds me of a new moon. It’s a little zen and a little redneck. Yay.

When I placed it on top of the new compost bin, I started thinking about cycles and how the new moon corresponds nicely with the idea of compost: with winter, sleep, death and decay. Here the simple symbol of the memory of fullness lapsed stands watch over decay slowly transforming into new life.

Yet it also looks a bit like a zero — a reminder of the zero point to which all things return and an instant reminder of how many miles our garden’s gifts travel from harvest to kitchen to dinner plate.

Starhawk, the activist pagan ecofeminist author, has said she considers compost a very nearly sacred thing. At this hour, I’m inclined to agree.

I want to rewrite this poem and mail it to every moment I’ve procrastinated over this month.

This White Unswaying Place

I’m sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone’s old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming.

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.

Sock-Monster is a little comic strip written by a fellow vegan and really talented cartoonist, Neil Brideau. Dark, funny, apt — I heart Sock-Monster. Check it out by clicking on the cartoon panel above.

Neil Gaiman reads his short story “Babycakes”

This is the rather random bit of mail that just made my day. You see, about a week ago I was doing some reading at VRF on Adam Durand, the activist who was recently sentenced for the part he played in filming undercover footage of a Wegman’s warehouse in upstate New York. Adam’s not only an active vegan with a conscience, he’s also a graphic designer who once contributed comics to the now defunct vegan zine, The Green Goat.

You’ll notice, if you clicked on that last link, that the front page doesn’t go anywhere. You simply get a nice picture of a green goat and a web address. So I asked around at VRF as to whatever happened to the zine. The answer shouldn’t have suprised me: like many zines, it burst onto the scene and folded not that long thereafter. Such is the way of the zine.

But Dave Dandelion, the wuvvable webmaster at VRF, just happened to have an old directory of a back issue which he posted as a PDF file. I spent a happy 20 minutes ogling some old stories written by a collective of vegans with whom I share the kind of tenuous, here-now-gone connection this worldwideweb easily affords.

I suppose that’s something that intrigues me. As easy as a web page, a username, a blog, a flckr account, or a zine are to produce, they’re just as easily abondoned. Many of them remain obscure and when they become relics they exist as the shell of a need which has transformed, evolved into something else, drifted elsewhere.

It’s easy to see the internet as a disembodied space of pure possibility. I suppose that’s why it feels like such a magic trick when it produces something. A relationship built of little more than text and shared ideas can sometimes result in something tangible, and when that’s happened, when I’ve recieved snail mail from my ether based friends, it always feels as though someon’s just pulled a coin or two from behind my ear.

Which is why I was delighted when I found Dave had decided to spontaneously send me a couple of old copies of The Green Goat he happened to have lying around. Just because.

The articles in the back issues of The Green Goat speak of possibilities — what might have been and what could be. They’re full of ideas, not just about how I can change my diet, recreate a cheeseless cheese, or redecorate my apartment compassionately. They showcase possibilities in how we can communicate, with humor or spleen, openly or satiricly, with polish and poise, or sometimes, just straight off the cuff.

I was intrigued by the conceit of Mike the Vegan’s Dog Farming story. I can’t promise you I won’t borrow the basic idea, someday. I wish I had an ongoing resource for The Thrust Reports. I wish Dave Dandelion DandyLion Dandy wrote more, busy as he is with websites and meetups and EarthSave and his dayjob.

But most of all, I was simply intrigued and delighted with this snapshot and the tenuous bubble of discovery that came along with it, as though the forest  breaks, and suddenly a clearing…

An excellent video, including a guest appearance from Richard D. Dryer, the man who coined the term speciesism.